With the development of society and the progress of technology, there is a high requirement in security and convenience for access control. Therefore a scheme that achieves an automatic, rapid, accurate and secure identity authentication has become a basic requirement in many network operations. Accordingly, conventional methods for identity authentication such as a password, a pass code, or an identification card are no longer capable of meeting the new requirement.
In recent years, a new technique that achieves identity authentication by using human biological characteristics such as a fingerprint, a palm print, a human face, a facial characteristic, or a voice pattern has gradually gained attention. The basic steps are as follows.
First, a user is required to perform a registration of his/her human biological characteristics, i.e., the user inputs a human biological characteristic and then a characteristic code is collected and stored. Next, whenever the user is required to perform an identity authentication, he/she is required to input the human biological characteristic and his/her characteristic code is collected again, and then the collected characteristic code is compared to the characteristic code which is stored during the registration to determine whether the two codes match each other. Thus the process of the identity authentication is completed.
Since a human biological characteristic is unique (every human being has different biological characteristics) and permanent (the biological characteristic does not change in a lifetime), this new technique is widely promoted and applied in many fields such as financial, telecommunication, transportation, education and medical fields as well.
As the technique of human biological characteristics identification has become more and more mature, the technique has been applied in fields that require remote access control, such as on-line banking transaction, on-line payment system, and remote access of enterprise servers. In these applications, a user may use different terminal devices for registering a human biological characteristic and for sending an identity authentication request respectively. For example, the user may use a terminal device provided by the service provider to input the registered human biological characteristics, and may use a sensor of a mobile terminal device to input the human biological characteristic and send the identity authentication request for a remote login when the user is required to perform a remote access. Therefore, a new problem has occurred. Various device providers have released their own human biological characteristics collecting devices, corresponding human biological characteristics collecting algorithms, and characteristic code comparing algorithm. The human biological characteristics collecting algorithms and characteristic code comparing algorithms of different device providers are different to each other. Thus the various devices from different providers are not compatible to each other and the user is required to use the terminal devices from different providers respectively for registering his/her human biological characteristics. Otherwise the user may not be able to perform a proper identity authentication.
Using fingerprint identification technology as an example, which is the most widely applied existing technology, when a user initially has used the fingerprint collecting terminal device of a provider A to register a fingerprint, a registered fingerprint characteristic code of the user is acquired by analyzing the fingerprint image and is stored in a fingerprint database. During a next identity authentication, a fingerprint collecting terminal device of a provider B is used for acquiring a fingerprint characteristic code of the user for authentication. A fingerprint verifying center will compare the registered fingerprint characteristic code of the user acquired from the fingerprint database with the current fingerprint characteristic code. However, since the characteristics collecting algorithm applied by the two fingerprint collecting terminal devices are different and the two fingerprint characteristic codes generated thereby are different as well, no matter which comparing algorithm is used, it is impossible to obtain a correct result and consequently the user's identity authentication is failed. To avoid such a situation, the user is required to register the fingerprints on both terminal devices respectively while performing a fingerprint registration, and each collected fingerprint characteristics codes should be stored in the fingerprint database to make sure that the identity authentication may be successfully performed. Since the terminal devices from different providers are not compatible with each other, the related operating procedures have become complicated as described above, and the user's demand for achieving a rapid, convenient identity authentication may not be fulfilled. Such a problem also affects the implementation of using this new technology in the field of remote access control.